Pop

(Paperback)

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Description

When Maggie is thirteen she goes to live with her grandfather in Sutton Coldfield. Pop knows everything - he's quiz champion of the Plough and Harrow and his ambition is to appear on 'Sale of the Century'. Maggie knows about the great comedians - Max Wall, Ken Dodd, Tommy Cooper, Eric and Ernie - and about country music, and about how her mother died. Pop sings with the poetry of the suburbs and aches with the poignancy of adolescence. Kitty Aldridge has a wonderfully distinctive voice and a deliciously sharp eye for the extraordinariness of ordinary lives.

Reviews

Pop is an unforgettable creation... By some distance the most eloquent first novel I have read this century...If literary London can lionise Zadie Smith, it should pay Kitty Aldridge the same compliment. She has star quality * Sunday Telegraph *
An authentic, gentle and genuinely funny account of ordinary life... This novel is at once life-affirming and important * Independent on Sunday *
Aldridge combines rich, poetic prose with an impressively light touch * Guardian *
A moving story, told with wit and invention, and the language shimmers in the heat-haze of sadness and loss. A truly original first novel * Daily Mail *
Kitty Aldridge is a real discovery, a writer of precision, delicacy and wit, and her first novel is a rare delight -- Salman Rushdie

Author Bio

Kitty Aldridge was born in the Middle East but grew up in England. A graduate of the Drama Centre, London, she has since worked in theatre, film, and television as an actress and writer. Her first novel, Pop (Cape, 2001), was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002 and shortlisted for the Pendleton May First Novel Award 2002. Her second novel, Cryers Hill, was published by Cape in 2007. Her short story, Arrivederci Les, won the Bridport Short Story Prize 2011 (Bridport Prize Anthology 2011). Her most recent novel is the critically-acclaimed A Trick I Learned From Dead Men.